New body's done, now to transfer the brain.

After I'd repaired the iPod nano, it was time to semi-retire my iPod mini. I knew that iTunes would fight me tooth-and-nail to keep me from moving my legally owned music from one of my legally owned devices to another. I wanted to transfer all my music from one to the other (and learn how to backup my music), and I wanted to do it on a low level to keep it simple.

The iPod saves the music that's put on it under random names under random folders. If you dig into the memory on an iPod, you'll find all your music, in a playable format, but you just don't have all the song names that corespond to the filenames. The music-to-filename information is held somewhere in the iTunes directory under the iPod_control directory on the iPod's storage partition. So, I just went into the iPod_control directory on the nano, and replaced the folders in it (music, itunes, and device) with the folders from my mini. After a bit, the transfer was complete, and I unmounted the nano, and found that the nano had all my songs, and playlists. I was suprised to see that the system playlists, "25 most played", and "my top rated" were still populated. The "recently played" system playlist was empty, which leads me to believe that the contents of this playlist are figured on a lower level than the rest.

Sweet.

EDIT: Bugger!
There something wrong with some of the music... I did some testing, and have concluded that what I did SHOULD have worked, but it seems that some entire CDs won't play, though they appear in the listings, and playlists. I'm not sure if there is any particular reason why certain CDs don't show up, though I suspect that there is a slight difference between the way the mini and the nano store their data. When I plug the nano into itunes, I can the music off of the nano that I can't play ON the nano... I poked it for some time and was unable to make any progress. I suspect I'll resign myself to transfering the music over as I did before, and making a list of the music that doesn't work so I can remove it from the device in itunes, and add it back... Strengeness...

UPDATE: Ah...
Ok, it's only the music that I bought and downloaded off of iTunes. Which makes sense because Apple's BS DRM nonsense probably registers any music bought from iTunes and put on an iPod to the specific iPod that it was put on. That would explain why iTunes would play it off the iPod, but the iPod refused to play it, and why it would pick up the track length which indicates that it's able to read the file (it just doesn't want you to hear it). You'd have to strip the DRM off of these tunes, though I'm not sure how well the song-to-file table will adjust. I'm going to remove the songs from the iPod with iTunes, and then add them back. At least the problems were only with songs already in the iTunes library (so I don't have to go searching for them...)